SOURCE: Jones, Leonidas M. “Reynolds' ‘The Romance of Youth,’ Hazlitt, and Keats's The Fall of Hyperion.” English Language Notes 16, no. 4 (June 1979): 294-300.

In the following essay, Jones compares poems by Reynolds and Keats, noting their similarities and arguing that Reynolds's work came first.

Noting the marked similarity between Keats's encounter with Moneta in The Fall of Hyperion and Reynolds' poet's confrontation with the visionary female in “The Romance of Youth,” Robert Gittings suggested that Reynolds' passage was a rather tame and pale echo of the intense and poetically charged imagery of his great friend.¹ Since “The Romance of Youth” was not published until May 1821, that is the normal inference which anyone would make faced by the apparently earlier composition of Keats's poem. But Gittings could not know of Clayton E. Hudnall's revelation in his excellent study of the Leigh Browne-Lockyer Collection that in January 1817 Reynolds copied into commonplace...